studio. Then he told everybody what he wanted: He played this line and he said that everybody would play that line in the ensembles. Then he said he wanted crescendi and decrescendi after every solo. We ran through some things together, until we were together, and then we got into it." The group recorded two takes of roughly equal duration. These would become known as Edition I and Edition II. At the end of the second take, Elvin Jones "flung his snare at the studio wall, signaling his decision that for him, the date was over." Marion Brown was more enthusiastic; later he described the session as "wildly exciting", the kind of record "you could use... to heat up the apartment on those cold winter days," and stated that both takes "had that kind of thing in them that makes people scream. The people who were in the studio were screaming. I don't know how the engineers kept the screams out of the record." John Tchicai recalled: "It was a feast, incomparable. On the day of the recording, ecstasy and excitement were the prime movers. All of us did our very best to contribute and to carry out the few instructions the Master had given us. It was very African! Our Ancestors were definitely among us more than usual!" Coltrane later stated that, during the session, "I was so doggone busy; I was worried to death... I couldn't really enjoy the [recording] date. If it hadn't been a date, then I would have really enjoyed it." At some point, he called Albert Ayler and explained: "I recorded an album and found that I was playing just like you", to which Ayler replied "No man, don't you see, you were playing like yourself. You were just feeling what I feel and were just crying out for spiritual unity." On July28, 1965, Coltrane and his quartet performed a version of Ascension on a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. A recording of the performance appears on Live in Paris, incorrectly titled "Blue Valse". Music Coltrane described Ascension in a radio interview as a "big band thing", although it resembles no big band recording made before it. The most obvious antecedent is Ornette Coleman's octet (or "double quartet") recording, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which—like Ascension—is a continuous 40-minute performance with ensemble passages and without breaks. However, on Ascension (and unlike on